Two ways. First off try to acquire an exclusive lock on the file. If you can get one then the FTP service has finished writing. Second way, repeatedly stat the file until it is a certain age old. 5-10 minutes should be OK but not absolutely failsafe. Third way, do both. :-)

Incidentally, the is no DOS (worth speaking of) on Win2k. Thank god. ;-) Normally we use the term 'shell' to refer to things like that. And i'm betting that the shell rename is waiting for a lock....

use Fctl;
my $canmove=0;
MOVE:{
      open my $fh,$filename or last MOVE;
      $canmove=flock $fh, LOCK_EX|LOCK_NB;
      close $fh;
}
if ($canmove) {
[download]

Something like that should do the trick. (And yes people I am aware that this has holes if there are multiple processes running here. I am assuming this isn't the case, and that all he needs to know is that the MSFTP service has done with the file.)

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....